John Buell

Better Safe Than Sorry

In December a US air marshal killed a man aboard an American
Airlines plane in Miami. The victim was carrying no explosives.
Suffering from bipolar disorder and off his medication, he had issued
threats. Taking no chances, the air marshal shot him.

Days afterward, Boston Globe columnist James Carroll wondered if
we have not become a hair-trigger nation so obsessed with risks that
we have turned our guardians into our potential killers. Carroll also
asked if the Miami incident "isn't the domestic equivalent of this
nation's hair-trigger foreign policy?"

Americans are fond of the phrase "better safe than sorry." Some
suggest it was far better to shoot this threatening character than to
allow him to blow up a planeload of innocent passengers. One hopes
that more details will emerge, but as I write this column, the whole
incident seems to have fallen from the radar screen.

For me, the incident begs us to ask if we are not dangerously
selective in our assessment of risks. Fear of ideological, ethnic and
cultural difference easily morphs into expectations of disaster from
suspect sources even as we overlook palpable dangers from more
familiar sources. In the process, freedoms are diminished and the
quality of life undermined. Paradoxically, the world itself becomes
more dangerous.

The Miami airport story resonates with me. I find airports to be
creepy places. Since 9/11, I have taken eight round-trip flights from
our local Bangor airport: four to Arizona for vacations and four to
eastern cities for political science conventions. On six of those
eight flights, I have been the only passenger in a relatively long
line to be singled out for intensive search of my body and clothes.
On my last trip, to Washington D.C., I was intensively searched both
in Bangor and at Reagan National.

I do not ask what triggers these searches. I am sure "security
reasons" preclude agents' revealing this information. I also fear
agents might take such a question as resistance or provocation. I am
not so enamored of my work as to suspect any federal officials have
read it and classed me as a threat. Nonetheless, in my worst moments
I have visions of being carted off somewhere and subjected to
interrogation without being able to contact friends or attorneys.

My late senior colleague at The Progressive, Erwin Knoll, had a
huge FBI file obtained through Freedom of Information litigation. His
file included extensive clippings from his columns. Most
interestingly, the FBI had redacted large sections of these articles
and editorials even though any of these columns could be located in
newspaper archives. My experience looking over his files has left
lingering concerns even as to the intelligence or training of the
security bureaucrats.

Just a few days before the federal air marshal gunned down his man
in Miami, the Bush administration was trying to scuttle Montreal
initiatives on climate change. The administration no longer denies
global warming. Instead, it maintains that predictions as to the
extent and speed of the process are indeterminate. Thus, any actions
taken to mitigate global warming must not damage our economy. It
seems that "better safe than sorry" extends only so far.

A number of prominent European leaders in both the scientific and
environmental communities consider climate change a threat at least
on par with so-called Islamic terrorism. A study by the Pentagon
during President Bush's first term raised similar alarms. Most
interestingly, the Pentagon predicted vast population migrations in
response to natural disasters. Is New Orleans a precursor?

At the start of the 21st century, Americans experience the
"outsourcing" of many of our best jobs, the collapse of pension
systems, a mass culture continually reshaped by media conglomerates
and diseases that travel at the speed of a bird or a plane. In
response, many citizens fall back on the tried and true -- a faith in
the nation, literal interpretations of the Bible and the
Constitution, corporate markets and economic growth. These ideals are
increasingly coupled with growing hatred of those who cannot endorse
or live these norms. If half the predictions regarding global warming
are true and our physical infrastructure deteriorates further,
resistance to and hatred of those who are different may intensify.
Such was the experience of medieval society during the great
plagues.

For my money, "better safe than sorry" translates into a refusal
to assume that the natural and cultural worlds were designed to fit
even our most cherished ideals. It means accepting and even learning
to take delight in a world where nature, including human nature, is
never fully orderly or predictable.

Our best bets lie in remaining attentive to the downsides of any
technology. In the social realm, we must periodically negotiate and
revise, both among ourselves and with other nations, procedures and
policy agendas that will allow increasingly blended, polyglot and
evolving cultures to live and thrive together. Fixing the world's
borders with something other than moats, walls and machine guns would
be my leading priority.

We may need guards on our planes, but if we can't curb our quest
to make the world fit our image, we may end up shooting at growing
numbers of ghosts while our coastal cities are flooded.